The Nazis Weren't Fascist?

[Music] hey what's up everyone today we're asking the question what type of movement was national socialism in other words how should we categorize the nazis the short answer is that they're a fascist and the longer answer is a more qualified answer still saying that they were fascist so what's going on here my last video was a 42 minute explainer on fascism where i treated the nazis as fascists throughout i don't read all the comments to my videos but i tried to read enough to get a general sense of how people are responding to them and one repeated comment that i saw said something like national socialism isn't fascism and if you could look at the screen right now that's how all the comments i saw were spelled this is coming from a simple point of confusion that's easy to clear up so to do that i'm going to list three terms on the screen the first term is nazism which is national socialism made shorter the second term is fascism and the third term is fascism those are three different terms that mean three different things but if you're only listening and you're not looking at the screen you're gonna have a hard time telling the difference the difference between the two fascisms is that one is capitalized and the other one isn't fascism with a capital f is specifically referring to italian fascism it's referring to the fascism that was in italy between world war one and world war ii fascism with the lowercase f is generic fascism so this is the fascism that fascist movements have in common it strips out the particulars of each country and just looks at the general idea so lowercase f is generic fascism capital f is italian fascism it's an unfortunately confusing distinction but that's the way it is so if somebody says that national socialism isn't fascism and again this is with a capital f what they're saying whether they intend it or not is that nazism isn't italian fascism but of course it's not there were two different things that would be like declaring that the russian revolution wasn't the french revolution or that a lion isn't a cheetah none of those are particularly meaningful or interesting things to say what's closer to our question today would be more like asking are lions and cheetahs both cats or were the french revolution and the russian revolutions both communist or were italian fascism and national socialism both fascists and this is fascist with the lower case f so this is now asking if italian fascism and national socialism were both generically fascist which is now a substantial categorical question i think that's what people meant when they were saying that national socialism isn't fascism so having cleared up that piece of semantic confusion this is an age-old question that i'm going to spend the rest of the video responding to so what type of movement was national socialism let me start by asking if you don't categorize national socialism as fascist what do you categorize them as and many people respond to that by saying that they were national socialist but that's a meaningless statement it's self-referential you're defining the subject with the subject itself the question is what type of movement was national socialism and you're responding by saying that national socialism was national socialist this would be like if i asked what type of country is the democratic people's republic of korea which is north korea and instead of responding that it's a communist country which is categorizing it in a broad label that we use instead you respond the democratic people's republic of korea is a democratic people's republic so that's self-referential and meaningless we need to be able to make generalizations when we talk about politics we can't just say that every country and every movement is unique and that's it there's no generalization i think that's a point that pretty much everyone recognizes but we also tend to circumstantially block generalization on partisan grounds so for example if you're offended when i called north korea communist are you also offended when people generalize other countries as being capitalist maybe but probably not okay so now we've established that we need to be able to make generalizations and that it's not sufficient to categorize national socialism as national socialist now let's look at the other popular answer to this question which is to say that national socialism was fascist and again this is talking about generic fascism what's unusual about fascism is that there's never been perfect agreement or anything really very close to it of what generic fascism actually is so that's a debate that my last video was trying to contribute to the answer i came up with in academic language is that fascism is the mass subordination of individuals to an aggressive nationalistic consciousness or in more visceral terminology fascism is the overriding principle that we think with the blood of our nation the blood of our nation runs through our veins and it's through that blood that we think which was a definition arrived at by trying to match the simplicity of karl marx's definition of communism and i formulated it by looking at the core ideas of both italian and german fascism which brings me to a point of awkwardness nazi germany tends to play such a big role in the subject of fascism that it tends to influence our definitions of it and that makes its relationship with the definition of fascism circular we believe that national socialism was fascist so we formulate a definition of fascism based on national socialism which then makes our definitions of fascism more closely resemble national socialism i'll pull up two more definitions of fascism to illustrate that the first is i believe the most widely respected academic definition from roger griffin which reads fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a paleogenetic form of populist ultranationalism the other definition comes from the webster's dictionary which reads fascism is a political philosophy movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition both are more complicated than my definition meaning that they have more moving parts than mine does but still both are pretty much spot-on descriptions of nazi germany but again this is coming from a circular relationship so to address that i think that's to some extent unavoidable and not a problem as long as we didn't make a mistake in originally identifying nazi germany as fascist which means that we need to ask the question did nazi germany's core ideas generically resemble the core ideas of fascist italy if you look at fascist italy's core ideas they were building up the myth of the nation of national consciousness and of subordinating the italian public to that consciousness which was supposed to be ultimately directed and controlled by a totalitarian state italian fascists also theorized about economics but in both theory and in practice the subject of economics was subordinated to the myth of the nation so they followed whatever economic policy they thought would bring about the greatness of the nation making the myth of the nation their core idea the thing is the myth of the nation playbook that fascist idli developed is pretty much a spot-on description of what nazi germany did too the nazis built up the myth of the german nation and of german consciousness then they subordinated the german people to that nationalistic consciousness which was directed and controlled by a totalitarian state which is to say if we accept these criteria as defining generic fascism then not only are we correct in labeling nazi germany as fascists but they were so wholeheartedly fascist they so wholeheartedly embodied these ideas that i would even say that they're the obvious candidate for being the most fascist political movement of all time the way i think about it italy theorized about fascism and then germany went ahead and really did it at this point you might be wondering why anyone thinks that nazi germany wasn't fascist and the main reason why is that people focus on what made nazi germany unique namely their heavy focus on racism and they say that nazi germany was so unique that it cannot be generalized so to fact check that against italy it's true that mussolini was hesitant to adopt hitler's racial policies and it's true that he thought that there was no such thing as a nation that was racially pure but he also did categorize the italian people as being their own race which to be fair was more normal at the time but he was also more into racism than people realize if you want your opinion of mussolini to take a precipitous drop feel free to pause the video and read the passage i have on the screen but regardless national socialism was unique in the sense that there's never been a political movement quite like it but if you think that keeps us from being able to categorize it i think you're misunderstanding the nature of general categories built into the concept of general categories is the idea that variations within those categories can put their own spin on things while the general category still holds true so just because something fits into a general category doesn't deny its uniqueness north korea is unique there's no other place on earth like it but at the same time it fits into the general category of being communist however controversially the united states is unique again there's no place like it and it also fits into the general category of being capitalist just as national socialism was unique while also fitting into the general category however controversially of being fascist so to go back to our animal friends we can call a cheetah a cat without compromising the uniqueness of cheetahs just as calling north korea communists doesn't compromise the uniqueness of north korea and the same goes for national socialism we can label it fascist without compromising the uniqueness of national socialism if you want to make the argument that something is so unique that it really cannot be categorized then go for it but i've never seen anyone make that argument when it comes to national socialism that can overcome the similarities it has with italian fascism when mussolini himself described the rise of nazi germany he described it as generically fascist the notable demographic that disagreed with that categorization was the nazis the nazis didn't like using the generic fascist label and they downplayed the influence that they seemingly took from fascist italy and instead they presented national socialism as an entirely homegrown unique german thing so you can read nazi literature until your eyes bleed and you won't find the nazis giving any type of ideological credit to the italians to understand why you have to think about who the nazis were they were avid nationalists who believed that the german nation german culture and german people were superior to all other alternatives everywhere if that's your mindset then you're probably not going to be too keen on highlighting your ideological indebtedness to another movement from another country that came into power on a similar platform first if the nazis had openly labeled themselves as generically fascist then we probably wouldn't be having debates like this today but they didn't so the rest of the world has had to do that labeling for them however contentiously ever since so was national socialism fascist yes the more qualified answer is that there's some controversy there but for the reasons stated in the video i don't think the arguments behind that controversy are good ones which is to say again national socialism was fascist thanks for watching i know my treatment of fascism was quick here so if you want a more in-depth treatment of it check out my longer video over here

Channel: Ryan Chapman

Views: 172,861

Keywords: fascism, national socialism, nazis fascist, what is fascism, fascism explained, was hitler fascist, generic fascism, national socialism fascist, national socialism explained, hitler socialism, what is national socialism, national socialism germany

Id: 0gfYbEk6rBY

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/gringobill]

I've watched quite a few and found them even handed.

[u/BTC-maxi]

I watched his ones on post modernism, wokeness and CRT. Thought they were excellent. He's on the money. Lays it out very clearly and intelligently.

[u/TheMarbleTrouble]

It’s good, but I’m always disappointed when Spanish Civil War isn’t mentioned in descriptions of fascism. It’s so good for contrast, since you had fascist, communist and anarchist. Orwell was there to fight fascist, while one Picasso’s most famous paintings, Guernica, is depicting it’s horrors.

[u/ABD140]

I like him a lot, then I discovered Second Thought, presented by another Chapman, J.T. to be precise. Also good. Wondering if they are brothers.